m. c. de marco:
To invent new life and new civilizations...

Another year, another NaNo: this was my tenth National Novel Writing Month, and my tenth victory. I took a couple of years off recently, but once I got back on the wagon it actually seemed easier than I recalled it being the other nine times.

I found the NaNoWriMo forums much less distracting this year, perhaps because I’ve read it all before. Another secret to my success was muting most of the people I follow on app.net; I’m looking forward to turning them all back on again tonight. I made a Patter room for NaNoWriMo, but that didn’t end up with much traffic.

The thing that distracted me the most this year was one of my tools: not Scrivener, which I upgraded to version 2.0 for this novel, but a fantasy family tree generation I’ve been working on all month to populate dwarf clans for the novel. It wasn’t particularly necessary, but it provided hours of fun and procrastination. The incomplete version is in my github account; once a few more bugs are shaken out I’ll put it up here for future NaNoWriMo use.

I tried out a few other cool tools this month, most notably Penflip—which I started using for a cookbook rather than the novel—and donjon’s generators (especially the world generators).